Senior Engineering Manager
Parloa Berlin, Germany · 19 hours ago · 28 people clicked apply
About the job
About Parloa
Parloa's ambition is to become an iconic AI Platform company serving Fortune 2000 enterprises, an opportunity that presents itself once-in-a-quarter-of-a-century. With global enterprise customers, we are already proving the impact of our Agent Management Platform (AMP), which is evolving into the AI Agent Management layer for enterprise AI transformation. We are building Europe's leading engineering organization to set the global benchmark for engineering excellence. Our mission is clear: deliver robust, enterprise-grade, resilient, and reliable AI solutions at speed. In a fast-moving market where sales cycles for multimillion-dollar deals can be as short as 1-2 months, speed is our currency. We are competing head-to-head with the big-tech companies and fast-moving AI-native startups.
Our engineering organization is structured into Customer Experience Automation (CXA), Product Platform, and Technology Platform together delivering a Composable Customer Experience Platform built from Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). Think AWS-like granularity, but built to empower enterprises with speed, flexibility, and resilience.
About The Role
A Senior Engineering Manager at Parloa does the same job as an Engineering Manager, at a bigger and harder scope. You own delivery and business outcomes for a large team, for two or more teams, or for a domain whose work spans several teams. Sometimes the scope is defined by size; sometimes it is defined by difficulty, such as a problem area where the technical and organisational complexity is genuinely hard, and where getting it right matters to the company's roadmap.
What changes at this level is altitude and durability. You communicate credibly to Directors and VPs without your manager in the room, framing recommendations and trade-offs rather than reporting status. You own the narrative for cross-functional work that travels beyond your teams. You take the conversations that Engineering Managers escalate to you - performance edge cases, prioritisation conflicts between teams, hard disagreements with peers - and you resolve them. And you are building the next layer of leaders: the tech leads who will become EMs, the senior engineers who will become Staff.
You are not primarily a manager of managers. Some Senior EMs move that way, on the path to Director, but most do not and this role does not require it. The people work gets harder at this level, not lighter.
Areas Of Ownership
- Own delivery across a multi-team or multi-domain scope. Set milestones, critical path, and quality gates. Manage cross-team dependencies actively rather than reporting on them. Hold a consistent bar for Definition of Done and quality across the scope.
- Set strategy and roadmap with Product, not unilaterally. Frame engineering investment in commercial terms - revenue, retention, margin - and surface customer and market signals into the plan.
- Own the narrative for cross-functional initiatives. Stakeholders walk away aligned, not merely informed. Author durable artefacts - plans, RFCs, escalation memos, postmortems — that still stand up months later and travel beyond the people in the room.
- Create the conditions for coherent technical direction. Partner with Staff+ ICs to shape the technical agenda and own tech debt strategy across your scope. Champion experimentation and prune low-signal bets early. Codify and share the learnings from failures.
- Hold operational discipline to a consistent standard. On-call, incident response, and postmortem practice across your scope; reliability targets aligned to product expectations; cost and unit-economics trends tracked and corrected before they spike. Treat blockers as priority work and clear them hands-on across team boundaries.
- Design the operating model for your scope. Roles, ownership, and on-call rotations; multi-team operating rhythm; aggregated DORA and SLO metrics; 3–6 month dependency mapping and capacity rebalancing.
- Grow the next layer of leaders. Hire senior ICs up to Staff level and, where applicable, first-line team leads. Build a pipeline for hard-to-fill roles. Identify and develop future managers and senior ICs from within. Drive calibration across your scope and coach peer managers on promotion standards.
- Eliminate classes of blockers, not just individual ones. When something breaks twice, you fix the system that lets it break.
Who You Are
- A proven engineering leader, typically 10+ years in software engineering with 4-6+ years of people leadership. You have owned outcomes for more than one team or for a domain spanning several teams.
- Credible with senior leadership. You can walk into a room with a VP or a CPO and frame a trade-off, not just present a status update. Your written work is concise and decision-driving.
- A builder of leaders. You can point to specific people you hired, grew, and promoted(e.g. a tech lead who became an EM, a senior engineer who became Staff) and describe what you actually did.
- Technically credible without needing to be the decision-maker. You partner with Staff and Principal engineers to shape technical direction through influence, and you know when to hold a standard versus when to let a team choose.
- Commercially fluent. You understand what your scope costs, what it returns, and how to have that conversation with Product and Finance.
- Comfortable with the hard conversations. Performance edge cases, prioritisation conflict between teams, and disagreements with peers are part of the job, and you take them on early rather than letting them fester.
- Pragmatic under real pressure. You have recovered a stalled cross-team initiative, or taken on a scope that had lost predictability, without burning out the engineers or making the EMs feel stepped on.
What This Role Is Not
- An Engineering Manager with a bigger title. The scope or impact has to be real.
- A step on the way to managing managers. Some Senior EMs go that way; most do not. This is a complete job on its own terms.
- Distance from your team. If you are looking for a role where the people work gets lighter, this is not it.
Why Join Parloa?
- Impact at Scale: Define the future of enterprise AI in a market ripe for disruption.
- Elite Talent Density: Work alongside top-tier engineers, Staff, and Principal leaders in a reverse-pyramid structure optimized for speed and innovation.
- Culture of Builders: Ownership, autonomy, and fearless iteration are not slogans—they are how we win.
- Uncapped Growth: Be part of an org growing 4x annually, where career opportunities multiply as fast as our business.
- Global Ambition: Help establish Parloa as Europe's most admired engineering organization, competing head-to-head with FAANG and beyond.
Our Recruiting Process
Recruiter Interview → Peer Interview → 360° Technical Interview Loop → Bar Raiser Interview
Equal Opportunity Statement
Parloa is committed to upholding the highest data protection standards for our clients' and employees' data. All our employees are instrumental in ensuring the utmost care, GDPR, and ISO compliance, including ISO 27001, in handling sensitive information.
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We provide equal opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, national origin, disability status, socioeconomic background and other characteristics.
